Poem fractal

The Ghost of the Murderer's Hut

by Banjo Paterson

17 February 1864 to 5 February 1941 (~77)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The lecturing is not so bad but the lonely travelling is awful. Anyhow the money is good which is the main thing.”

Balancing an honest admission of loneliness with practical good humour · Letter to George Robertson from Launceston, circa 1900

More remarks (19)

Drawing the boundary…

Read the poem Another poem

A fractal is a shape that keeps its pattern when you look closer. Coastlines, trees, shells, and weather do this. A poem can be drawn the same way.

The poem’s constant is read from the build of its lines: their length, the size of the stanzas, and the share of vowels. Poems whose constants lie closer together are built more alike. The same poem always draws the same picture. Change the length of a line, the stanza, or the vowel share, and both the number and the picture move.

Primunia is the name for the source of that order: the pattern under the pattern, already there in a tree, a shell, and a verse.

Poems nearby in the constant

A smaller distance means the lines are built more alike.

  1. Percy Bysshe Shelley · −0.4123 − 0.4900i · 0.008 away · Compare side by side
  2. Thomas Hardy · −0.4119 − 0.4944i · 0.010 away · Compare side by side
  3. Charlotte Brontë · −0.4144 − 0.4764i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  4. Ralph Waldo Emerson · −0.3916 − 0.4723i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
  5. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · −0.4114 − 0.5126i · 0.025 away · Compare side by side
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